


The Untitled

by AwayLaughing



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Post-Dragon Age Inquisition, Spoilers, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 12:27:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2692982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwayLaughing/pseuds/AwayLaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dwarves don't really have fairy tales, but some dwarves have witnessed them, and some of those understand the importance of writing them down.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Once upon a time there was a dreamer...</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Untitled

**Author's Note:**

> It's weird, and vaguely spoilery for the Solas romance and also written in two tenses on purpose.

_Once upon a time there was a man._

No. Wrong.

_Once upon a time, there was a dreamer who knew too much._

_Once upon a time there was a hunter who lacked too much._

No no, he scratches it out. Not wrong, but distinctly not right, either.

_Once upon a time, there was a dreamer who dreamed of spring in winter, and a hunter who hunted for answers in an endless fog. The dreamer dreamed all the time, looking for a way to end the frost and never found it. Instead he found answers and secrets and questions no one thought to ask and he dreamed of someone to share all those things with. But no one wanted the answers or secrets or new questions of a wandering dreamer._

_The hunter, trapped in the thickest fog, could never find her own answers. She found plants and animals when she tripped on gnarled roots and heard songs in tree leaves when she tried to climb higher than the smothering mist, but never her answers. Never found a home suitable for a desperate hunter._

_Often in her dreams and what was in many ways his reality, however, they met. She would ask him old questions and he would offer her new ones to think about as she looked. He would tell her secrets older than the Stone, and she would believe him in a way no one else ever did._

Varric's editor – new non-liar editor – stares over at him over the steeple of her ink stained fingers, golden eyes cool. Between the eyes, the accent and her probable-ability to kill him with her pinky finger, he's fairly certain he's found yet another Pentaghast.

But Maker's breath, she can sell a serial. His old publisher must be crying into his knock-off whisky after the last Hard in Hightown chapter sales. Serves him right. _Not popular in Orlais_ Varric's ass.

His editor keeps staring.

“I know it's not-”

“Silence,” she says, and he listens. She doesn't usually interrupt him, so either she's going to murder him, or she's going to get her helper to do it. “This is not your usual fair, Varric,” she says at last. “And certainly not why we took you on.”

They probably poached him because Cassandra asked Josephine to call in favours, but Varric keeps his tongue between his teeth. Last time he implied that she threatened to shave his chest. Publicly.

“I'm aware,” he says, “it's more of a...personal piece.”

“It is a child's bedtime story,” she says, “a fairy tale.”

_One night, when the snow was piled high and the fog thicker than soup, the hunter asked the dreamer, “will I ever meet you for real?”_

_And the dreamer asked, “isn't this real?”_

_And the hunter thought very carefully – which the dreamer appreciated and said, “will I ever get to keep you company when no one else can?” which the dreamer did not know the answer to._

“ _I do not know the future,” he said at last, which the hunter did not really appreciate as much as he'd appreciated her own thinking. The dreamer was used to be alone, but he was also very good at reading the hunter by now, so he scrambled for a better answer. “It's possible,” he said, “you walk the ancient woods, as do I.”_

_The hunter, brought low by her failure to find anything in the real world, nodded, disheartened. “I must go soon,” she said, “the sun is coming.”_

_The dreamer had asked her once how she always knew and she'd told him, “I just have to believe, since I cannot know.” He'd told her that her faith was inspiring, if somewhat baffling. She'd laughed at him and told him sometimes faith was all you had._

_The dreamer was not a man of Faith, however faithful he was._

“ _Then walk well,” he told her, in the way he always said good bye._

There it was. Fairy tales by Varric Tethras. It was, to be fair, a far, far cry from Hard in Hightown. Or Sword in Shield, though the second one wasn't really a mark against it.

“I guess it is,” he says, “just...it doesn't have to sell well, alright? I'll front the money needed to make it sell in the green myself, if it does that poorly.” She arches an eyebrow that says _explain_ , at him. “It's a story that needs to be told, is all. No. Remembered.”

“By whom?” she asks, apparently intrigued.

Varric chuckles, “that's a story I won't ever tell.”

“I thought that was the crossbow,” she asks. Varric gives her a smile.

“That's _can't_. This is won't,” a huge difference. He could write another series entirely on it. “It's personal, though not my personal. A...bigger personal.”

“A bigger personal,” she says in the same way someone would say _you did_ what _with an eggplant_. “I will see if Wilhelm likes it. That will be the deciding factor.”

Wilhelm's a nice kid, and he's very fond of Varric's impromptu _The Fish and the Wave_ stories, but Varric's not certain he's the right audience for this particular story.

“It's not exactly...happy,” he hedges. He's always demanding that the Fish find a way to be stay with the Wave forever. He'll find a way to make it happen eventually, but this isn't about waves or fish and no one stays in the end.

“It's not,” she agrees, “but at least there's not any beheading.”

_Until he didn't. One night, while she slept, the dreamer stumbled across a sleeping woman – almost falling right on top her. Without anyone to keep her preoccupied in her dreams, the hunter almost awoke, but had fallen far from her path that day and was so tired she did not. The dreamer, startled to find his companion in the flesh, sat in silence for a long time, unsure. If he slept, he could tell her to wake up and they could talk in person, if she would listen._

_But he did not. Because she was a hunter and he was a dreamer, and if she woke up and saw him, she would realize that in dreams not all things are as reality. She presented herself without a mask. The dreamer did not. So instead he waited out the night at her side, waiting until the hunter started to wake before he left._

_When the hunter woke, the ground beside her was warm and the snow melted as if someone had been sat upon it. There was no one there however, and she was confused until she stretched, and found a note tucked under the cloak she used as a pillow._

_Walk well, and believe._

_The hunter never saw the dreamer again, neither asleep nor awake, and the dreamer kept a wide berth, not realizing that when he had sat beneath the tree with the hunter, buds had started to appear, only to die in the bitter frost that followed his departure. He had been to busy condemning the hunter to memory.  
_

“Not in the literal sense at least,” Varric agrees.

_Once upon a time there was dreamer who looked for spring and brought winter, and a hunter who looked for answers and only got questions in return. They wandered a great ancient forest, circling on another and their goals while snow fell and fog rolled in and the sun probably rose._

_They lived, ever after._

"If I agree to this, what will we call it?"

Varric wishes at least the title was snappy, or even existent. It might redeem him.

"I don't know."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry?


End file.
